Stuck in gridlock traffic while commuting to work
REFLECTING ON YOUR ANGER
Reflecting on our anger will help us to better understand ourselves and make lasting change.
Reflecting on our anger will help us to better understand ourselves and make lasting change.
A QUICK DEBRIEF ON YOUR ANGER
Now that we’ve learned several strategies and techniques to help us handle our anger in the moment, let’s look at using an Anger Tracking Log to help review and improve how we deal with situations that trigger our anger.
We’ll start with an example, then let you give it a try.
Stuck in gridlock traffic while commuting to work
Signs:
Trigger:
Honked at the driver, yelled at him, started speeding up as I had urge to cut back in front of him to tell him off.
Got too caught up in things, but then noticed I was driving too fast myself and slowed down.
Other driver didn’t change their behaviour, could see him keeping passing people turn they turned off.
I started speeding for a second and would have been liable if I caused an accident.
I almost accidentally hit a different car when I was starting to speed up and switch lanes.
Next time, I’ll try to notice my anger before I start to speed up so it isn’t controlling me.
I can try taking a few deep breaths and remind myself, the driver isn’t worth my energy.
It wasn’t too bad today, but if I need to I can take a couple minutes in my car when I park to do some deep breathing and listen to a song I like.
Think of the last 2-3 recent times you got angry. For one of them fill out the anger log below to the best of your memory. You can use your notes on your anger triggers from Part 2, or you can use different situations.
You can use the form below or download and use our Anger Tracking Log (PDF).
Reflecting on what you can do differently in the future, specific skills you can use, and how to implement them is crucial to making meaningful change.
You can save the log above to your device and/or bookmark this page to come back. Try to track your anger over the next couple weeks. Once you’ve done a few logs you can look back and see if there are any patterns that emerge, that may help us to manage or avoid certain things that keep triggering us, and also evaluate which strategies helped the most for reducing your anger.
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